Listening at the Gate

by Betsy James

  “Was there a tariff?” I asked now.

  “Not on what we bought. Sister, there’s more to being a Downshoreman than dancing on Long Night.”

  “I might at least have wondered!”

  Mailin, Pao, and Nondany had stopped their talk and were listening to us. Mailin said, “I don’t think you were helped to wonder.”

  “Not by our aunts,” said Dai. “Revenge and recipes, that’s their life. Nor by our uncles, who think a woman’s job is to make the bed and then lie in it.”

  Robin said, “You’re so hard on them!”

  “They’re my family.”

  “I’m your family”

  “But it is worse now,” I said. “There’s gossip everywhere. Nondany, you heard it. Even the old man said how bad it was, before he—before they—”

  “—kissed him,” said Dai. “That’s Harlan’s word. ‘I’ll kiss you,’ he says. He has different ways to do it. Doesn’t he kiss sweet?” He turned back the cuff of his short trousers. On the inside of his thigh was the scar of a deep burn, as if a poker had been laid along the muscle’s length.

  “Dai!”

  He covered the scar. “Just a kiss. More promised next time.”

  I went hot and sick, hearing Ab Harlan’s voice say Shall we kiss her? So that was why Dai and Mailin had flinched at my scars. The kitchen was not safe, the world was not safe, there were paidmen at the door, and behind them Harlan panted. I said, “Why did he do that?”

  “For leaving the League,” said Dai. “Though he said it was for being slow to pay the tariff on the cow. Twice. First time, a week in the guardhouse. Three of us; had a good time, got to work on those floorboards—no Downshoreman need be bored in lockup. Second time it wasn’t the guardhouse. Harlan took me to Detention and gave me this. For cockiness. Did you know Harlan is my Rulespatron? That’s like a godfather,” he said to Robin. “He can better my character and entertain himself at the same time. Detention’s reserved for Leaguemen. We’re quality.”

  “He used that word with me—’Detention,’” I said.

  “A girl wouldn’t know about it. Detention’s up there among his warehouses, but deep in, locks and bars—it’s his playground; he keeps his toys there. When he laid the poker on me, he said, As I recall, you could never sit still at your sums. Think of the favor I can do you: The next time I see you here, I’ll make sure sitting is all you ever do again.’”

  “He’s mad!”

  “Was he ever a rose?”

  “He was horrible. But not like that. People don’t just suddenly go mad. The League hasn’t stopped him?”

  Then I remembered that dreadful lullaby, and what was taken for granted by every family in Upslope: that children were to be slapped or beaten or shamed, starved or threatened or locked in the dark, “to teach them to be good.” It was in miniature, but it was all there.

  “Right after you left, Sister, that’s when he began to tighten the screws.”

  A Rig stole the bride of Ab Harlot’s son and carried her off to be his queen under the waves, and Ab Harlot’s gone mad with rage. Those wild tales had been telling a kind of truth. I said, “I’m the reason he’s doing this.”

  “Don’t give yourself airs, brat.”

  “I shamed him. I refused his son—”

  “Queelic, child accountant,” said Dai. “We did our sums together.”

  “—and I ran away to a dirty native.” I turned to look at Nall and saw him grave, intent.

  Nondany had been quiet. Now he lifted his hand from the strings of the dindarion and it made that sound—soft, but so deep, I felt it in my bones. Nall sat forward.

  “A tidal wave is caused by the snapping of tension that has built for a long time,” said Nondany. “An earthquake under the sea. To be caught in a tidal wave is not to be its cause.”

  “I don’t think Ab Harlan would distinguish between a great slight and a small one, Kat,” said Pao. “You foul him, as we foul him, by existing.” He rubbed his eyes. “This earthquake has been long overdue.”

  “He said I was a witch, that he must be purged of me.”

  Mailin said, “When I think what his childhood must have been, to make him what he is, my soul cringes in me.”

  “My heart’s broken,” said Dai.

  “Was it a happy thing to be a child in Upslope?” said Mailin. “I ask this of you, who soon will have a child.”

  He looked ashamed. I answered for him. “It was lonely as death.”

  “Never knew how little Father gave us until I met you,” said Dai, nodding at the group around the fire. “Leaguemen aren’t fathers, they’re power-traders. That’s the seed of these bad times; Harlan’s just the flower.”

  “Could we get along with no merchants?” said Mailin. “We have our little shopkeepers, but the world needs traders. The Leaguemen are not—but they could be—like the network of a river, connecting us with other lands, taking and bringing goods and news and songs—”

  “On the day hell freezes,” said Dai. “On the day I say I love my father.”

  A miserable silence fell. The flames gobbled at the wood.

  Nondany cleared his throat. “It’s useful to take a peek at history,” he said in his precise voice. He touched the dindarion. This time it sounded a true chord, sonorous. “As a tribe—they would hate to hear me call them a tribe, although, of course, they are—the Leaguemen worship Light. This particular group, in Upslope, has lived on the coast for generations; yet they hate and fear the sea. Now tell me—what lives in the sea?”

  “Fish?” said Robin.

  But the rest of us stared at Nall.

  “Exactly,” said Nondany. He played a fluid trill. “The Rigi. Nall, what do your people worship?”

  Nall looked from Nondany to the dindarion. Did not answer.

  “No matter. We don’t know what our deepest beliefs are any more than Robin’s fish knows what water is. But to my mind the Rigi worship—”

  “Dreams,” said Nall, as though he spoke from one. “The deep, the darkness. The moon barely seen. The Gate.”

  “Ah, the Gate at the world’s end, through which all things come to be!”

  “You know about the Gate?”

  “I am a Downshoreman. Your ancestors danced with mine.”

  “They talk little here about the Gate,” said Nall. “As though it were a place in a story, not real—and always with fear. Except Mailin.” He gave her a warm glance.

  “The Gate is dark and distant for us now,” said Nondany. “As if the Rigi took it with them when they left. That which is hidden breeds fear.”

  “The Gate is not hidden. It stands in the sea. I saw it and heard it every day of my life, until I was killed. It is right to fear it.”

  “Fear and worship live in the same house. I was about to say that the League worships the Light—”

  “—and ledgers,” said Dai with a grin. “For totting up accounts.”

  “If you like. The Leaguemen worship the Light and ledgers. The Rigi worship the Dark and the Gate.”

  Nondany held up his right hand and named it, “Leaguemen,” his left, “Rigi.” Nodding at each in turn, he said, “East, west. Day, night. Light, Dark. Earth, sea.”

  “Ledgers, Gate,” said Dai, enjoying himself. But Nall leaned forward, so absorbed that I felt a twinge of jealousy.

  Nondany’s hands made fists; they fought each other. Then the left disappeared behind his back, leaving the right hand lonely, palm up. “See? Here are our Leaguemen—especially Ab Harlan—alone now in the wealth and daylight they crave. They have driven away the Rigi, the moon people, the animal dreamers they despise and fear. But along with the Rigi they have driven away their own children.” Nondany looked from me to Dai. “I ask you now: Who could live like that and not be in pain?”

  He brought his left hand out of hiding, took up the din-darion, and sat back.

  “The Leaguemen have lost the Gate,” said Nall. Then, as if to himself, “Not only the Leaguemen.”

  Dai sai
d, “Pretty story, sir. But my kindness is all gone.”

  Robin stroked his shaved head. “No, it isn’t.”

  “If Harlan’s in pain, he deserves it.” Dai clenched his teeth. “My god, this last while! Tariffs, taxes, fines—murders, even. Paidmen plaguing the borders. How’s a man to get breeding stock? Harlan’s squatting on the roads like a spider on its web. Our little shopkeepers are strangled and starving. As if we had money to spend, anyway….”

  I remembered the big talk of the Weedrun boy, that if a Black Boot set foot outside the market, he would be skewered. Not with a camp of armed soldiers there!

  As though he read my thoughts, Dai said, “Paidmen aren’t so stupid as to show their faces down here. All payments are to be made at the guardhouse, if you please. That’s the only thing stopping a fight. The rough lads—nay, even the peaceable ones—want a brawl, and after tonight’s escapade I expect they’ll get it. Maybe you triggered the quake, brat, but it’s been building for generations.”

  “But why should you bear this?” I said. “Murders? And Ab Harlan levies tariffs and fines—why do you pay them? You keep saying you’re in a trap. Who set it?”

  In the firelight each face fell, even Nondany’s. Only Nall’s was unchanged, intent.

  “We did,” said Mailin. “Lali Kat, we are not telling you the whole truth.”

  I looked at Dai. He dropped his eyes, then faced me and muttered, “We owe him money.”

  “Who?”

  “Ab Harlan.”

  I knew nothing about money. I had never had any. I had grown kale, made cook pots, carded wool, baked bread, raised chickens, and chased crows out of cornfields, but never for money. All the coins I ever handled had been doled out to me by my father, warm from his pockets.

  I felt ignorant and ashamed. “But he buys your fish.”

  “The fishing has been bad,” said Pao.

  “Other market stuff, then. Vegetables.”

  “Worth pennies.”

  “You sell him sealskins!”

  “The seals are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “All gone,” said Mailin. “This winter. Withdrawn from us between one moon and the next, the beaches empty. There are no more seals on these shores, Lali Kat.”

  I remembered how, as he showed me his manat, Nall had said, When there were still seals. “Where have they gone?”

  “Who knows? We killed so many, perhaps the king of seals has called the rest away.”

  I turned to Nall. Was he not the king of the sea, and I his queen? “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.” But his face said he knew something.

  Mailin said, “All we know is that there are no more sealskins to sell to Ab Harlan for our debt.”

  In the silence the kittens squirmed and mewed. I saw for the first time how shabby the kitchen was, patched and mended, all its goods worn thin.

  “It started so small,” said Mailin. “And so long ago. A bad fishing season and a bad harvest. Before the Leaguemen came, we would have gone hungry. A few old people, a few children might have died; we would have eaten nettles and cockles and begged from our neighbors. But the Leaguemen—it was Ab Harlan’s father then—offered small loans, to families and the council. That got us through until the seal-killing; so we killed extra. But the next harvest was poor too. Who would eat nettles when she could buy corn on credit? More loans, and a little help to the shopkeeper. Another bad year.

  “So it grew.” Her voice was tired and wondering. “How fast debt grows! We would borrow against the catch, kill more seals—but then we’d buy a little brandy, too. Or cinnamon for the holidays, or ribbons, or a wedding ring. We were hungry for trinkets. You think Ab Harlan has a devil in his belly—what have we in ours? Lali, we are in debt to him for our lives. We have a little corn, some pigs, dried tomatoes—that’s all. He has grown cruel now; he takes everything else for the debt. He takes young men when they can’t pay, to work off what they owe as road guards—like paidmen but not paid. He took Suni’s man.”

  Pretty Suni, with fat Rosie in her arms, who had sold me fish. “Rosie’s father? Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes. A press gang caught him on the road. They carried him far off, traded him for some poor debtor from another village. The League doesn’t like pressed lads to be near their families.”

  Mailin bowed her head. Dai looked defiant, Pao looked tired and old. Nondany had silenced the dindarion with a hand across the strings.

  I turned in Nall’s arms, seeing firelight on the sleek of his eye. As if I showed him my scars, my shame, I said, “The Leaguemen are my people.”

  “You think mine are better?” His tongue played at his broken tooth. “A club kills as dead as a gibbet.”

  “The Rigi don’t have an Ab Harlan!”

  “No?”

  In his face I saw a story I had not heard. I did not want to hear it. I wanted him to be for me, merry and teasing, the man I had called.

  He held up both hands like Nondany and said, “When one hand is sick, so is the other.”

  “But you don’t owe anybody anything!”

  “I owe everybody everything,” he said. “I owe you my life.”

  “You do not! Who do you think I am, Ab Harlan keeping books?”

  “Nall would fetch a good price,” said Dai. “He’s the last seal in the place.”

  “Oh,” I cried, “why doesn’t it ever get easier? Can’t there be a time, finally, when we can just be happy?”

  “No,” said Nall. Then, “Yes.” He smiled.

  “When?”

  “Now,” he said, and kissed me.

  The dindarion’s hum lapped the room like water. Tipping his chair onto its back legs, Nondany said to Nall, “You are a singer, I understand?”

  “Yes. But first a listener.”

  “A seal priest?”

  “No. But a listener.”

  “Explain.”

  “There are no words for it,” said Nall.

  As there were no words for the Bear. But the mountain felt far away and strange; this world was the sea, it was Nall’s.

  “Use the words you have,” said Nondany.

  Nall rubbed his mouth. Beyond the open door the sea fell—thud, thud—on the sand. After a little he said, “In the deep beyond the Gate swims everything that is not yet. Everything: what may be; what will be; what would be. With each tide the world rushes in and out between the stones of the Gate. There one can hear the world coming into being, taking its shapes. That is listening.”

  The fire snapped. Nondany said, “It takes its shapes as songs?”

  “As everything. But as it does that, it sings. In words, if one is lucky; I am lucky. The water gives the music.”

  “Do you find you are as well able to listen here, so far from the Gate?”

  “You are the first to ask that.”

  “Everybody but me has manners.”

  “I listen in water,” said Nall. “I swim and listen. Even here, if I am in the sea, I can hear the Gate, but very far away. Like a known voice. And the words—” He frowned. “I think it is the Gate,” he said.

  “I should think water your element.” Nondany and his dindarion balanced on the chair’s two legs, motionless as a dragonfly in midair. “What do you hear?”

  “Now?”

  “These days. Given the strangeness of your … arrival here, and Downshore’s distress, I assume you have listened for what may be coming through the Gate? For all of us.”

  Nall flushed. I looked aside; I knew I was part of that strangeness and did not want to be. He said, “I have listened. Tried to.”

  “And?”

  The room was as still as that mountain meadow before the Roadsoul girl had sung.

  “Something is coming,” said Nall.

  “A song? A change in the world?”

  “The world and a song are the same.”

  “You have heard what this coming thing will be?”

  “When I hear it, I will know.”

  �
�Will you sing it?”

  “Sing it or live it. Also the same.” He glanced around, as though remembering the rest of us. “But something is always coming. From the hour the sea was made until it breaks no longer, the world is rushing in and out through the Gate.”

  Nondany’s chair came back onto four legs with a thump. Dai said, “Misty Rig talk, Brother.”

  “I was a Rig.”

  Was.

  “Well, now you’re a tar-handed boatbuilder,” said Dai.

  “Not to Downshore folk.”

  “Aye, to them you’re a Rig and an omen,” said Dai. He looked at me from under his brows. “You saw the crowd on the beach, Sister. Been needing an omen around here. Folk think this laddie’s come from the sea to clear the debt with Ab Harlan, and they’re waiting for him to do it. It’ll have to be by magic, for he never saw a copper penny in his life till I showed him one.”

  “I thought it was a fish scale,” said Nall. “It smelled like blood.”

  “Enough prophecy, then,” said Nondany. “If you build songs and boats, try this.” Smiling, he held out the dindarion.

  Nall reached around me and took it. He held it at arm’s length in front of us, balanced on his hands, and laughed. It sounded with his laugh; he laughed again, brought it closer, and sang at it.

  See how we dance, love,

  Round the town,

  Then ring-a-rose,love,

  We all fall down.

  His voice made the strings of the dindarion ring. When he stopped singing, they hummed on.

  “It purrs!” he said.

  “You like it?” said Nondany, retrieving it. “Good, for I’m offering you a bribe: Teach me songs, and I’ll teach you to play the dindarion. But what you just sang is a Downshore ballad, and that won’t do. I’ll have some Rig music out of you, Nall, or I’m a Roadsoul.”

  This bargain must have satisfied Nondany, for he rose and stretched. The first pale light of dawn bleached the windows. “I must go. Remember you have that paidmen’s song for me, Half-and-Half.” He bent to lay his cheek on mine.